Renegade Cut on "Berman Trek"

[BridgeConsoleMasher]

The only issue I really have with the video is that he puts Roddenberry on too much of a pedestal, clearly as a direct contrast to Berman.

Tell you the truth it's pretty surprising he gave Roddenberry a bit of a break. I mean I'm personally not of the mind to necessarily define him by his failings, and I guess also the video is about Berman

I think that was really bothering me. It's lying by omission in a way that just feels like a double-standard. It's creating a thesis and then finding an argument to fit it and crafting a video around that, leaving out anything that would contradict it, even if it means you're manufacturing the final image which is presented as "factually-based".

If you're speculating on the direction Trek took while considering TNG/era's rise and fall then a lot of this stuff in whole is pretty inconclusive. I personally don't think it's enough to call Berman the prominent declining factor of TNG era, but it's certainly enough to think twice about his involvement.

I think that if you think the strength of season 3/4 and his work on DS9 are commendable then that's pretty fair to contend with in my book, but I suppose there's enough here to submit into evidence in the case against him so to speak.

[Makeshift Python]

Ron Jone (on TNG)

According to 'The Fifty Year Mission', Berman claims not to have fired him but more that he was let go sort via committee. That other staff members, along with Berman, decided to go with other composers.

Even if true, he still doesn't explain why all the background music of his tenure was so consistently bland.

Never understood at all why they got rid of him, his work was outstanding. Thankfully he done other Star Trek projects, albeit for video games. Even his score that he worked on jointly with Brian Luzetti for the Starfleet Academy game was by far better than virtually every score on TV after his departure.

There's a CD box set for Ron Jones featuring his entire work on TNG, including his video game music. It's an excellent set made even more excellent by the liner notes provided by Jones commenting on every single episode he worked on. It gets pretty extensive on the decisions from production, who was on who's side and so on.

FSM also posted the entire liner notes online, so if you wanna find out about details regarding episode scores it's all here: https://www.filmscoremonthly.com/notes/box05_intro.html

Here's an example of the creative clashing over music:

“I did this cue [‘Needing Love’] when Yar was coming unglued and it was this big emotional thing and after I did it everyone said ‘bravo,’” Jones recalls, but it was dropped from the finished episode—as was a wistful piano melody (“Horny Doctor”) that would have transformed a discomfiting comic scene between Captain Jean-Luc Picard (Patrick Stewart) and Dr. Beverly Crusher into a moment of bonding. Jones remembers, “The next week Rick Berman came in and said, ‘Can’t you write anything non-emotional?’” It would be the first of many such exchanges between composer and producer. (Around the same time, Dennis McCarthy remembers Berman so loathed his romantic, yearning score to “Haven”—McCarthy’s first hour-long episode—that he was sure he was going to be fired.)

[Kinky Vorlon]

Has Ron ever explained his aversion to making things emotional? It makes no sense, as an artist, you want your art to provoke an emotional response in your audience. Otherwise you've completely failed as an artist.

[AlucardNoir]

Has Ron ever explained his aversion to making things emotional? It makes no sense, as an artist, you want your art to provoke an emotional response in your audience. Otherwise you've completely failed as an artist.

Nice to know someone else agrees with me and thinks all modern "art" is trash and all "artists" that make said "art" are failures.

[Rodan56]

I'm not the biggest fan of RC's videos, he might be a bit too far on the left even for me. I think he gave Roddenberry too much slack in terms of his shortcomings and probably not enough credit to Berman for what he did. However, it is undeniable that Berman's actions sabotaged a good deal of the really interesting concepts that HE himself set in motion. Voyager especially. I mean, if long time fans of Chuck's show at this point know anything it's that Berman is hardly immune to blame.

I found the video fairly informative, if a bit biased against Berman, but it's not inaccurate either. It's the very definition of the phase "Well, you're not wrong..."

[Imperator-zor]

Has Ron ever explained his aversion to making things emotional? It makes no sense, as an artist, you want your art to provoke an emotional response in your audience. Otherwise you've completely failed as an artist.

Nice to know someone else agrees with me and thinks all modern "art" is trash and all "artists" that make said "art" are failures.

If you hate modern art, you hate Star Trek given that it is distinctly modernist in it's aesthetic sensibilities.

Zor

[Antiboyscout]

Has Ron ever explained his aversion to making things emotional? It makes no sense, as an artist, you want your art to provoke an emotional response in your audience. Otherwise you've completely failed as an artist.

Nice to know someone else agrees with me and thinks all modern "art" is trash and all "artists" that make said "art" are failures.

If you hate modern art, you hate Star Trek given that it is distinctly modernist in it's aesthetic sensibilities.

Zor

Except TOS, It's so old now that it has become retro-futuristic.

[Mecha82]

Doesn't change fact that you are hypocrite.

[Riedquat]

Doesn't change fact that you are hypocrite.

Different sort of art. Calling someone a hypocrite over this is to try to simplify the discussion down to one aspect to the exclusion of all others and insist that every opinion must be relevant to that aspect.

Here the art is in the stortelling, the visual aesthetic is in support of that (an oversimplification in itself, but hopefully it helps to get the point across). The modern storytelling aesthetic would be (with my cynical hat on, which I rarely remove) grim, "edgy", and people being downright unpleasant to each other. Which I'm not keen on.

It's also not hypocritical to generally dislike something but have exceptions.

[MithrandirOlorin]

He now also has a video on Generations.